LOBBY is the card that pays you in onchain stocks. Every time someone spends with LOBBY, part of that spending creates stock cashback, which means that as the network grows, an increasingly important question emerges: where should all of that cashback actually go? Rather than making that decision ourselves, LOBBY puts it in the hands of $LOBBY holders through veLOBBY, a voting system heavily inspired by the mechanism Curve introduced with veCRV in 2020. $LOBBY can be locked to receive veLOBBY, with longer remaining locks carrying greater voting power and that voting power gradually decaying as the lock approaches expiry. The exact lock parameters will be introduced alongside the system itself, but the basic idea is the same one that made voting escrow such an interesting primitive in DeFi: if you want long term influence over where the protocol directs value, you have to make a long term commitment to it.
Curve showed what can happen when voting power controls something that other participants actually want. After veCRV launched in 2020, Curve gauges allowed veCRV holders to vote on how CRV emissions were distributed across liquidity pools, with gauge weights updated on a weekly cycle. By 2021, protocols had started competing aggressively for that voting power because receiving more gauge weight meant receiving more CRV emissions, which could attract more liquidity. Convex accelerated this dynamic after launching in May 2021 by aggregating CRV and veCRV voting power, and the competition that followed became known as the Curve Wars. The important part of that period for LOBBY is the incentive structure it demonstrated. Once governance controls the direction of a valuable economic flow, that governance itself becomes valuable to anyone who has an interest in where the flow ends up.
veLOBBY applies that idea to stock cashback. Every week, veLOBBY holders vote across gauges representing different tokenized stocks, and the resulting weights determine how LOBBY's cashback purchasing is allocated for that epoch. If the AAPL gauge receives 20% of the total weight, then 20% of the stock cashback purchasing for that period is directed toward tokenized AAPL. If another stock receives 5%, it receives 5%. As more people use LOBBY for everyday spending, those votes therefore represent something increasingly tangible: a decision over where a stream of recurring onchain stock purchases is directed. Instead of governance being a vote over abstract protocol parameters, veLOBBY holders are voting over the destination of real economic activity generated by card spending.
This becomes particularly interesting for the companies and communities represented by those gauges. A smaller public company, for example, could have a direct reason to care about its position within LOBBY. It could acquire $LOBBY, lock it for veLOBBY and vote toward its own stock, increasing its share of the cashback flow. Existing shareholders, communities and other participants with an interest in that company could independently do the same. As the amount of spending going through LOBBY increases, so does the value of deciding where that spending ultimately lands. The result is a system where the interests of cardholders, $LOBBY holders and the stocks represented within LOBBY can begin to overlap around the same gauges.
The original Curve Wars were a competition over where liquidity incentives should flow. veLOBBY takes the same basic mechanism and applies it to a different kind of flow, the stock cashback generated by everyday spending. LOBBY turns card activity into recurring purchases of tokenized stocks, while veLOBBY gives its holders control over how those purchases are distributed.
